Puffy, the Vampire Tolerator
by Dilleniidae Salicacea
Summary: Buffy as though written by Douglas Adams with a hangover -- through a shot glass, darkly. Silly, indefensibly inane chronicles of an incompetent vampire and a listless, laissez-faire slayer. Names changed to protect the dignity of the original characters.
1. Prologue & Chapter 1

Prologue

Schmutzplunk the Vampire arduously extracted his teeth from the clump of epoxy cow dung in which they had become embedded.

"Never again," he muttered to himself, "will I try to feed in a glue factory for the lactose tolerant."

It had been a difficult week for Schmutzplunk, what with his disastrous appearance on a local talk show with two werehamsters and a dyspeptic ghoul. The host, a Katie Couric-lookalike who sniffed disdainfully at Schmutzplunk's ratty roquelaure and cheap Payless boots, refused even to shut up the hammy hamsters, who monopolized most of the discussion on that week's topic: "Humans: Better with Oregano?" The ghoul just retreated to a corner and moaned, but then, most of them do.

Barely had he managed to scrape the last accretions of epoxy polymer from his left front fang (the sensitive one), when a booming, inauspicious knock reverberated through his crypt, suggesting the presence of a visitor on his front cenotaph, of which he had, in a given week... well, none, and so this could not be considered a good portent.

"Open, O miserable spawn of Satan... or Santayana... one of those bad guys, anyway! Knowest thou not that he who fails to study hemoglobin is doomed to imbibe it?"

Schmutzplunk shook his head. Another ersatz blood salesman. Who came around to your private crypt anymore, for Spike's sake? Didn't these guys know enough to resort to telemarketing?

Chapter One - Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyeteeth

It was a dark and stormy midafternoon, and the sun shone brightly, but somewhere else. Puffy, Pillow and Pander had spent three unavailing hours picketing Vlad's Meatless Burgers (Juice Only), the latest in a series of specialty fast blood emporia catering to the local vampire population, ever since the Endangered Bloodsuckers Protection Act had been forced through by Meshuggadale's (heavily Republican) city council, nine months ago. Chiles, Puffy's mentor and a defrocked member of the Voyeur's Council, had already given up in disgust and returned to Islington to open a Scone Shoppe. The business was proving successful, alas (insofar as any business located in Islington could be said to, really, which meant that it hadn't closed), so Puffy was momentarily Voyeur-less, and had had to donate a whole closet-full of lacy nighties to the Salvation Army.

"Oh, patent teleological fallacies," mumbled Pillow, feeling annoyed and seeking to be more intelligible than usual.

"Huh?" replied Pander, likewise exhibiting the depth of penetrating insight that so impressed everyone who didn't meet him.

"We have to find something more productive to do with our afternoons," Puffy finally concluded, doing a backward somersault just so a passerby couldn't possibly fail to be dazzled, disconcerted and rather annoyed by the evident lack of restraint of what appeared to be a visiting circus troupe. He hastened off before the mimes could arrive.

"What about convoluted rituals involving ancient, unpronounceable languages and dead chickens?" Pillow tentatively suggested.

"No, no, we did that last week," Pander complained. "What's with the unpronounceable languages, anyway? Can't we have a decent ritual without choking up on pharyngeal fricatives and ingressive clicks?" 


	2. Chapter 2

Stretching irritably, Schmutzplunk heaved his ungainly bulk (terrible to have been vampirized two days before committing to a rigorous program of daily exercise and Cheetos renunciation) up off the floor of his crypt, and stumbled forward to confront the dusk. Which was really, really dusky, and not, Schmutzplunk had often had occasion to think, at all a good time to be getting out of bed, or even out of a bed of mouldy earth. Whoever had made up the rules concerning vampire wakefulness and undue susceptibility to self-immolation under the influence of solar radiation, campfires and tanning beds, simply had not got a good grasp of Circadian rhythms or the shopping hours of Home Depot, Target or Lenscrafters. (Schmutzplunk was embarrassingly myopic, often mistaking stop signs for potential victims, an unfortunate condition his conversion to the ranks of the undead had done nothing to ameliorate. It just didn't seem fair.)

_Slayers_ got to rise at rosy-fingered dawn. They got to go jogging when it was still possible to do so without banging into street signs. They could hang out at shopping malls, eat at Olive Gardens, and even have their vision corrected, when needed (though slayers, for some annoying genetic reason, seemed always to enjoy 20/20 optical acuity). Schmutzplunk was sorely aggrieved. After all, what had _he_ ever done that Genghis Khan, Vlad Tepes, or dozens of modern serial killers hadn't? And did _they_ have to get up when it was too late even to start on a todo list? You bet your hemophagic posterior, they didn't.

On the other hand, life (well, _un_life) as a vampire had its advantages. Immortality was high on the list, though it did subject one to an indefinite number of reruns of all the episodes of Sesame Street, ER and Boston Law. And in the natural chain of predators, vampires had very little to fear, other than from investment bankers and the one girl in all the world who couldn't afford airplane tickets to travel everywhere else in all the world, thus sparing every half-sane vampire who chose not to live in Meshuggadale (or who could be bothered to buy a GPS system to track Puffy's cell phone) from the least scintilla of worry or concern.

_Blood_, thought Schmutchplunk. _Need blood_. He thought that a lot. Part of it could be chalked up to atavistic vampiric impulse, but in all fairness, the sheer inarticulateness really could not. Schmutzplunk had never been the sharpest fang in the typodont. It was 7:55, and all the hospital bloodbanks had, by now, quadrupled their laser-armed security details, whereas the private purveyors of bootleg and synthetic blood that _were_ wide open for business, tended to feature price inventories that would have beggared Donald Trump. (Well, not _really_, and Trump _was_ one of their best customers, but for ordinary, workanight vamps, even the synthetic stuff was inordinately pricey. Schmutzplunk wondered if he shouldn't have dispatched the antelucan crypt-to-crypt guy, but he knew the cheap product was always rancid, and often drawn from rats, lemurs and politicians, or synthesized from recycled industrial toxins.)

Oh, well. Nothing for it but to make another foray into the creepy Meshuggadale night, but due diligence should never be neglected. Schmutzplunk booted up his old Dell, hijacked a wi-fi signal from an adjacent crypt (_un_- -- strangely enough -- en_crypt_ed), and logged into whereisthefreakingslayer-dot-com. Puffy, it seemed, had gone to a movie with the other Scoobies, and Chiles was (as usual) at home, polishing up his Sumerian. Strange pharyngeal grunts could be heard coming from the mike secreted in his living room. "Gilgamesh-grunt-grunt" exclaimed Chiles; _he_ obviously wasn't going to be much of a problem. Schmutzplunk powered down the Dell and ventured out into the night, steering for Meshuggadale's neon-light district. On the way, he bumped into a street sign. 


	3. Chapter 3

While Chiles slept (even as Gotham City and Meshuggadale didn't, particularly, but then, big agglomerations of buildings very rarely snore, exhale or suffer from sleep apnea), Puffy, Pillow and Pander lazily meandered down to the Iron. This was a Meshuggadale institution, a nightclub featuring lots of alternative singers and bands, and really rancid coca cola, for those unable to produce a forged ID, which was actually no one, since they'd pretty much accept any old scraggly piece of plastic or cardboard with smeary printing that looked approximately rectangular and might or might not sport a photo (often of Sarah Michelle Gellar, or sometimes a nice seascape). The Iron had previously been known as "The Bronze," but had recently been re-baptised when assiduous research by Chiles and a group of local historians had revealed that the Bronze Age had ended something like three thousand years ago, even before the advent of twitter, and that it made a really sucky base metal for swords and shields, in any case.

The evening's featured performer was Sophie Zelmani, reprising her ever-popular, "I Don't Remember; I'm Amnestic." Pander grabbed a table in the corner, and when it didn't grab back, the three of them sat down and ordered bloody Mary's, hold the blood, which was something Puffy found herself doing all too often. After a perfunctory scan of the place to identify any teenagers drinking with very pale people who had likewise ordered bloody Mary's (hold Mary) -- for purposes of later identification at the morgue -- Puffy relaxed a bit and began to groove to the melody. Pillow closed her eyes and imagined French monkeys _qui avaient piqué des pantalons_, which had to make one _really_ wonder about Pillow. Pander just leered at the linoleum.

Within a few minutes, though, the sounds of a scuffle could be heard at the door. An incredibly schlumpy, unshaven and ill-dressed vampire with a grumpy demeanor was arguing with the bouncer about the necessity for a photo on a photo id, of which he didn't, incidentally, have one, but felt aggrieved that photos should be necessary in any case, since vampires tended not to appear on film (except for Fujika, and certain types of Kodachrome). "Grunt-grunt," bellowed (or possibly belched) the vampire, which would have excited Chiles if he had been present, hinting at the possibility of a riveting discussion in Ancient Sumerian. (The author feels compelled to interject, for the sake of historical integrity, that as of the time of writing of _The Epic of Gilgamesh_, the Sumerians had yet to discover rivets, riveting machines, or even rebars. It was a generally bad time for the construction industry, and also for finding snakes of life.) Ignoring the editorial insertion, the bouncer had decided to eject the fractious vampire, not so much because he was belligerent, as because he was pig-ugly and had failed entirely to offer a suitable emolument for the favor of being admitted to the smoky, noisy (and largely adolescent) inner sanctum.

"Grunt-grunt," reiterated Schmutzplunk, this time shoving the bouncer aside, and gracefully stumbling over three tables, a waiter, and a small irregularity in the linoleum floor, before smashing his head against the wall, dislocating his shoulder, rebounding from the edge of the bar and landing face up and slightly dazed on the floor right next to the Scoobies. "Grunt-grunt," he said, in something approximating Pillow's direction.

Delighted thus to be addressed in Ancient Sumerian, which she had learned in the fifth grade, analyzed for her doctoral dissertation at twelve, and eventually taught to Chiles the year before, Pillow responded, "Grunt-gree-gree-grunt-hunt-and-peck?" This was a very formal response to what Pillow had taken to mean "I'm very pleased to meet you by banging my head into the floor adjacent your table," but by which Schmutzplunk had actually meant, "I'm dyspeptic and grumpy and can't be bothered to articulate all those phoneme thingies, and by the way, where can I go to throw up?" 


	4. Chapter 4

Puffy glanced indifferently at the incapacitated (and seriously inaesthetic) vampire who seemed to have the inclination to do her work for her, if only he could be induced to stick some spare piece of wood into his own heart without annoying her further. "Pity," Gandalf had once said of Bilbo, "stayed his hand," but dubious moralistic injunctions from fictional characters created by bored philologists really didn't cut much ice with Puffy, and in any case, it would probably have been asking a great deal, even of Mother Theresa, to attempt to summon sympathy for the sorry lump of metabolization-challenged post-humanity splayed stupidly before her, still emitting "grunt-grunt" noises, though by this time, even Pillow had managed to discern that this was not a form of barely post-neolithic language, but just a bout of intemperate groaning interspersed with the sweet, melodic strains of pepcid-uninhibited borborygmus.

Still, there was the matter of handing the grunting thing a sharp piece of wood, when the Iron featured only plastic and cheap metal furniture, and neither of her friends happened to be on crutches (_that_ night). Also, and more importantly, she really couldn't give a rat's turd whether the thing managed to struggle to its feet or not. She did foresee that danger might later arise if this particular vamp managed to isolate a four-year old child in a dark alley. The vamp would undoubtedly have his ass kicked, but that was strictly outside her purview. "Live and let necrotize:" that was Puffy's motto. The sheer gall of the Voyeur's Council -- a bunch of old white guys with too much money, too little to do, and upper-crust British accents of seriously questionable authenticity -- expecting her to exterminate victims of anemia with anger management problems seven days a week and entirely _pro bono_ was just _too much_. She'd stuck it out because of her fondness for Chiles for a whole year and two months, but since then, she'd only killed vampires if they seriously pissed her off. Her rule for humans was a bit less stringent. She'd only kill them if they crossed her shadow, spoke with a simulated upper-crust British accent, or looked annoying. Or if she felt like it.

The Meshuggadale police, wholly uninterested in enforcing the EBPA, and also wholly uninterested in tangling with pissed-off teenage girls with superpowers, and in general, wholly uninterested in things that involved... well, _exertion_, had no interest in following her around. Bodies were commonplace in Meshuggadale, and if not picked up by the the coroner's wagon, were usually carted off within hours by accommodating medical students to stock the gross anatomy lab of Meshuggadale University's Health Science Center. Meshuggadale, population 1,703 and monotonically declining since 1872, (which gave rise to many questions, most of them seriously mathematical) seemed nevertheless able to support a major university, two symphony orchestras, any number of art galleries, fourteen new car showrooms, one nightclub, three ice skating rinks, six fast blood emporia, and a divinity school. Pillow sometimes thought this anomalous, but she found it better not to evince signs of consciousness. Consciousness (much less intelligence) were not traits greatly prized by the local citizenry, since both led to questions, and questions led to... um, what was the question?

Even as these thoughts were wending their way torpidly through the slayer's vodka-soaked cortices, Schmutzplunk was regaining a measure of animation and dragging himself up off the floor. He collapsed into a vacant plastic chair and stared intently at the slayer. "Pardon me, Miss," he inquired, "is this the Chattanooga Blood Bank?" Puffy negligently pulled off his arm and departed, Pillow and Pander trailing after. 


	5. Chapter 5

Schmutzplink was pissed. And "pissed" with all the many and varied interpretations of which that lexeme was susceptible. He was, for a start, of course, nine sheets to the wind on vodka-laced hemoglobin, but then, that was an habitual state easily dismissed except to the extent that it made him trip over tables, fall down stairs, and slur his menacing growls -- not particularly orotund in their execution, even at the best of times. (Sir Laurence Olivier, he would never be mistaken for, far less Dracula.) "Pissed," too, in an unfortunate sense which may have described the not-unprecedented state of his trousers. But most of all, Schmutzplunk was enraged that the Slayer had relieved him of his right arm, which at the moment lay twitching listlessly two feet to the right of his exposed rotator cuff. Now, that was just _embarrassing_, especially since she'd conspicuously spared _every_ effort, and performed the act in the presence of 200 hitherto-disinterested-but-now-rather-contemptuously-bemused **human** teenagers. He _would_ be avenged.

First, though, there was the matter of locomotion, which it had to be acknowledged would be much less convenient to accomplish in two parts, than in the usual one (though, on reflection, he considered himself lucky that Puffy had had no particular thoughts of Gaul at the time of her departure). _Omnia Schmutzplunk est in tres partes divisa_ might have been comprehensible to Pillow, but it lacked a certain aesthetic resonance and would certainly have rendered his plight even more uncongenial, since he might not then have been able to use his left arm to slap the right one back into place, a place into which it immediately settled comfortably, reintegrating with the whole that was Schmutzplunk (others might have spelled it differently). Thus "re-armed," the apoplectic vampire stomped forth (amid giggles from the peanut gallery), headed for the exit, and knocking over only two tables and a statue of The Iron's founder, Harry Bronze, ventured out into the Meshuggadale night, consumed with evil and retributive visions, not a sugar plum fairy dancing among them.

One problem Schmutzplunk had most immediately to face was the lack of a trail to follow. Puffy, alas, didn't _stink_ -- at least, though other opinions might vary, in any _olfactory_ sense -- but downtown Meshuggadale reeked in such a way as to make one long for the sweet aroma of oil refineries on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or the downwind perfumed appeal of any number of hog processing plants. Suffice it to say, the ambient stench was enough to mask that of Puffy's "hemoglobin mist" brand of Slayer shampoo. Fortunately for those compelled to navigate its business district, though, even without an N95 mask and a respirator, Meshuggadale wasn't overencumbered with streets, having something on the order of... oh, come to think of it, _one_. (The university and the multiple symphony orchestras hovered on the periphery of town, and the ice skating rink was on loan from Minnesota, except that it stayed there and thus wasn't used very frequently by Meshuggadale inhabitants who lacked unlimited frequent flyer miles.)

This narrowed Schmutzplunk's options to two: up the street... and down the street. Had he remained _in duas partes divisa_, he could have sent his right arm upwind, whilst his body travelled in the opposite direction, but then, his right arm was hardly Nagini, and could not have been trusted to report back, or possibly even to _come back_, once liberated from its bottom-feeding owner, whom it found, well, sartorially embarrassing. Schmutzplunk was not a good accessory for any self-respecting right arm, and accessorization counted for a lot in metacarpal circles, not to mention the ulnar ones. Getting back to our narrative, though (of which none is yet discernible), Schmutzplunk, for once in his _un_life guessing correctly, turned to the left and staggered off after the intrepid (well, only mildly trepid) trio, who were heading off to Meshuggadale's beret shop in search of a nightcap. 


	6. Chapter 6

Zigzagging up Main Street, lurching into pedestrians, park benches, collies, great Danes (Niels Bohr and Per Lagerkvist, most notably), and also the occasional fire hydrant, Schmutzplunk attempted to catch sight of the Torpid Trio -- Puffy, Pillow and Pander -- as the latter shopped desultorily in possibly the only shop whose front window he hadn't managed inadvertently to smash with one limb or another: Benoit's Berets.

Pander, unable to find a suitable night cap, did, though, find himself gazing out the unbroken window at Schmutzplunk's disastrous progress (or lack thereof), and pointed him out to Puffy, inquiring with characteristic acuity, "um... Puffy, isn't that, like, a vampire-thingy?"

This was actually the _last_ thing Puffy wanted to hear. If she acknowledged that the pale, moribund-looking, fang-bedight spawn of Satan stumbling up the street _was_ actually a vampire (as opposed to, say, a zombie, a werewolf, or an ascetic Romantic poet from the 19th century), then she'd feel morally obliged -- though not much inclined -- to kill the "damned" (she used the word advisedly) thing, an undertaking which might require the expenditure of effort far better devoted to drinking, shopping for funny hats, or playing World of Warcraft. What she most wanted, actually, was just to go home and take a nap for, say, eleven hours, before getting up to have a bowl of Rice Krispies and then going back to bed.

It was Chiles' view that Puffy was really unacceptably indolent and lackadaisical, a view the validity of which turned on whether absolute narcissistic indiffference to the fate of humanity borne of annoyance at being "chosen" without having anything to do with the "choosing" was something that Chiles (and humanity) were bound to accept. It _had_ occurred to Chiles, and more than once, that if "something" were to happen to Puffy, a stray accident by which 2,700 vampires were inadvertently admitted to her house, for example, then a new Slayer would come to be activated, and odds-on, the new one might be less frivolous. This, however, would have involved a measure of perfidy at which even a graduate of the Voyeur's Academy had to cavil, and so Chiles had solved the problem by going back to England to sell scones (yummy, and the very best thing to have with tea), leaving Puffy to carry on with slayage as the winds of boredom and caprice, and the shoes of Prada, might move her.

In any case, after some nanoseconds of reflection (Puffy either thought preternaturally fast, or wasn't big on reflection; the solution is left to the reader), the Slayer decided to succumb to instinct and swept out the door, following Schmutzplunk's putrescent wake amd the trail of overturned sidewalk furniture. 


	7. Chapter 7

Ah, Meshuggadale in the evening! Shall I compare thee to a biohazardous radioactive waste dump? Thou art more comely than a rotted head, more foul, necrotic and more tenebrous. Rough winds do bear thy saprophytes aloft, which sweetly putrefaction spread afar, alighting on the living and the dead, and cats whom Heisenberg's not yet collapsed.

This poetic vision, itself engraved by a long deceased bard (along with _"lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate"_) on the gates to the city, was, alas, altogether lost on Puffy -- an uncharacteristically focussed, goal-directed... almost _sentient_ Puffy -- as she sped through the evening's miasma, sniffing for Schmutzplunk's distinctive stench (and retching only intermittently), seeking to pick it out from all the surrounding redolences in the stinky atmosphere of the northern half of Main Street. This proved ultimately not to be necessary, though, as Schmutzplunk left in his Godzilla-reminiscent wake enough detritus to fill the warehouse from the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

_"You!"_, Puffy screamed, as Schmutzplunk, still several neurons short of a full thimble, stopped and turned to greet his interlocutor. "You freaking need a bath... oh, and also to be killed, _a lot_." Puffy was only doing her job (and inasmuch as this was a thing she only rarely condescended to do, it seems captious to point out that, had she not shouted, she could have done Schmutzplunk in the back with a good deal less in the way of fuss, bother and confrontation), but Schmutzplunk, insensitive as he was, _really_ hated to be yelled at in public, and moreso on the subject of his deficient hygience. Vampires were _supposed_ to stink. Ablutions did _not_ feature prominently in their _ADUL's_ (Activities of Daily Unliving). Was the Slayer too dense to absorb this fundamental fact, or just too wedded to her tired and overused, Voyeur-endorsed insults and objurgations? ("Objurgations" was not a word that Schmutzplunk found leaping to his mind on an excess of occasions, but then, neither was "cat." It was a tribute to Puffy's preternatural obnoxiousness that she had managed to provoke him into this lifetime-achievement-level production of a word involving more than one syllable, and unrecognizable to most American college students.) "Grunt-grunt," Schmutzplunk exclaimed, with rather more declamatory zeal, and ran at the Slayer, brandishing one of at least two items with which Puffy did not want to be attacked or impaled... in this case, Pander. Pander had earlier managed to catch up with Puffy, but had overtaken and passed her in the relentless smog, and had been on the verge of becoming Schmutzplunk's pre-prandial apéritif, before the vampire found a more immediate use for the cretinous lunk. Pillow, on the other hand, had succumbed to hypoxia several blocks back, had sat on the curb, and was still trying, valiantly, to extract oxygen from the Meshuggadale evening miasma.

"Puffy, watch out!" Pander managed to cry out, quite supererogatorily, since by the time he'd finished croaking "Puffy," she'd already dodged around Schmutzplunk, pulled him out from under the vampire's prodigiously smelly armpit, and set him down on the roof of a decrepit Hyundai, the most ostentatiously luxurious vehicle for blocks around. She then executed a triple salchow, did three pirouettes just for show, and punched Schmutzplunk in the face. Since all of this took about 30 seconds, Schmutzplunk had just time to duck. Perhaps time, even, for a duck to come down and give him a hundred dollars, which strangely (or perhaps not, this being Meshuggadale), a fairly unconvincing-looking undead bird, species anatine, chose that moment to do. Not that $100 American was likely to extricate Schmutzplunk from his current dilemma, or suffice, for that matter, to pay the bill for any two drinks at Starbucks. On the other hand, it did so gobsmack Puffy that a goofy bird from a nearly-paleolithic television show should suddenly descend from Meshuggadale's murky sky, that her dazedness afforded Schmutzplunk a few more seconds of breathing room. These he used to absent himself, disappearing down a conveniently placed manhole. 


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - A Despondency of Vampires

Hesitating not a second (but something on the order of 37 minutes, actually: to comb her hair, scratch her nose, order a company of surveyors to check the passability of the sewer corridor, and don a hazmat suit), Puffy dove immediately (except for the 37 minutes part) down the manhole after Schmutzplunk, in ice-cold pursuit.

Avoiding hordes of rats, clusters of spiders, binds of salmon (battling the current of sewage to spawn upstream), intrusions of roaches, murders of crows (dead, and hence unable to escape from the sewer), exaltations of doves (hard to see what they were "exalted" about, though), companies of travelling mimes, three optically-impaired mice, and several floating dictionaries of terms of venery, Puffy eventually caught a whiff of the torpidly fleeing Schmutzplunk, who had managed to catch and eat one of the doves, and was now sitting in a pool of effluvia, all confusedly exalted and too disequilibrated to run any further. He was holding a soggy tome in his clawed extremities, and trying to memorize the term of venery for worms ("bryce," for some reason it was etymologically impossible to discern).

"Ahem," gurgled Puffy through her hazmat facemask. "Sorry to interrupt, but I have to eviscerate you now." This, had he been _compos mentis_, might have caused Schmutzplunk a moment's anxiety, but as it happened, he wasn't. Unfortunately, as it happened also, Puffy, in donning the bulky helmet, respirator and padded hazmat gear, had forgotten to keep her handy stake on the _outside_ of the suit, and so could feel the thing through the impenetrable mylar, but not retrieve it without removing the entire fashionable ensemble. Also, since the suit rather seriously impaired her mobility, hitting the vampire in the head with a spare etymological dictionary was proving more difficult than she might have anticipated, and Schmutzplunk, gradually losing his fascination for exalted birds and English philology, was, after his fashion, or lack thereof, starting to move away from her, seemingly in search of the dark at the end of the tunnel.

This "dark," which was a _really_ light-repellent, black-hole-quality sort of "dark," was emanating from a side door to the tunnel, one of many conveniently provided by the servants of the Master to afford 24/7 access to the nether regions of the Hellmouth, which featured eternal suffering and a not-bad shopping mall. Puffy chose not to follow.

Schmutzplunk, scrambling through the Stygian portal and showing his "evil-minion" ID to the bouncer stationed on the other side, gave Puffy a single-digit salute, and disappeared with alacrity into the bowels of hell. (Which seemed, incidentally, seriously in need of Pepto Bismol.) "It would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well," Puffy thought, unconsciously echoing Julian of Norwich, of whom she'd never heard. (Editor's note: The inventory of things scholarly of which Puffy had never heard had been determined scientifically and with arithmetic precision by a team of mathematicians commissioned by Chiles and the Voyeur's Council, to be non-recursively enumerable.) In any case, Puffy felt she had only to go back to the Iron and wait for Schmutzplunk to get bored with the underground mall, and most particularly the selection at Brookstone's, and the poorly-staffed Drink Court. Vampires were always claiming portentously, and with varying degrees of stentorian resonance, that they wanted to let loose Hell on Earth, but the commuters and the drop-ins who spent any time there knew perfectly well that this would usher in a Millennium of Vampire Boredom that would induce most of them to chew off their own left arms.

END OF PART I 


	9. Chapter 9

PART II - Weary Schmutzplunk and the Half-Blood Plasma

Chapter 9 - The Dice are Cast... Iron

Back at The Iron, Puffy, Pillow and Pander had reconvened to consider the relative merits of vampire slayage, witchcraft, drywall application, intramural volleyball... and getting stinking drunk. An early consensus was coalescing around the latter alternative, though harnessing Pillow's powers of thaumaturgy, Puffy's preternatural strength, and Pander's unnatural preoccupation with shoddy construction techniques (and linoleum) to erect a 50-foot drywall barrier around all of Meshuggadale to contain the Hellmouth -- and then get stinking drunk -- would have seemed like a good idea except for the parts that didn't involve getting sozzled. Those parts would have involved _effort_. Volleyball, too, and the last time Puffy had tried _that_, she'd somehow got overenthusiastic and _staked_ the ball, which, surprisingly enough, had not proven a crowd-pleasing tactic, and had also got the three of them banned from participation in... well, most organized activities involving other humans. Five pitchers of beer later, though (and one trip to the restroom), Puffy started vaguely to wonder what had become of Schmutzplunk (whom she didn't think of as "Schmutzplunk," of course, but just "that klutzy, overweight vampire with the defective command of Ancient Sumerian").

Meanwhile, in an icky corner of the Hellmouth (well, a _particularly_ icky corner, taking it as read that no corner of Hell is really comfy and well-furnished, unless it's an elite club for politicians and CEO's and located on one of Hell's extension campuses, of which the two most preeminent, NYC and DC, need no further characterization here)... in a _particularly_ icky corner (perhaps the one described in _les Jeux Sont Faits_), Schmutzplunk sat mournfully, contemplating his existential woes, his navel, and clumps of green stuff that appeared to be growing between his toes, and wondering if he couldn't just catch a _bateau lord-of-les-mouches_ and lift his spirits (well, his _mood_, anyway), by taking in the sights on the banks of the Acheron. Souls in eternal agony, for example, and a whole lot of art deco architecture. And then, of course, there was the nightly card game, televised on Hell BO on a plasma TV on the observation deck, in which Ken Lay and Abraham Madoff were currently holding a slight edge against Satan by the expedient of wearing designer shirts with suspiciously long sleeves.

On the other hand (one not covered by suspiciously long sleeves), there was still the niggling, unresolved matter of the Slayer and her cohorts (who really needed to get a life -- or to get dead: to Schmutzplunk and most of the hemophagic community, either would be an acceptable option). _"Who,"_ Schmutzplunk could not help ruminating, and within earshot of any number of unsavory characters, some of whom were not vampires or even MBA's, _"who_ will rid me of this meddlesome pri...er, Slayer?" "I will! I will! I will!" arose a resounding chorus of enthusiastic cries from vamps, incubi, succubi, inferi, and other infernal beings, finding themselves somewhat at loose ends on a Saturday night, and always on the lookout for a good, juicy victim. _Hmm,_" thought Schmutzplunk, _I think I read something Conrad once said about the fate of the instigators of a revolution, which might give me pause were I but possessed of more neurons than teeth, but screw Conrad. Who writes a book called _Heart of Darkness_, and makes not a single reference to Hell, Meshuggadale, or even Dick Cheney? No, I think I hear the sound of bloodthirsty volunteers. Best to strike while The Iron is hot._ (Not nearly so hot, of course, as Schmutzplunk's current venue, but with much more annoying bands.) Schmutzplunk betook himself to gather prospective raiders for (_yet another_) demonic incursion into Meshuggadale.

End of Chapter 9 


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10 - The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned in Light Beer

In a small flat in Islington, Chiles lay alone on his couch, engorged with tea and scones, too bloated to move, and too deeply engrossed in "The Idiot's Guide to Esoteric Necromantic Transmogrifications for Festive Apocalyptic Occasions" to fall asleep. Despite his decommissioning by the Voyeur's Council for "acts unbefitting a pompous and sadistic buffoon" (his objection to Puffy's "rite of excruciation for the sake of satisfying the Schadenfreude of stuffy cretins" -- as the "cruciamentum" was officially defined, both in the _Voyeur's Handbook_ and in the _DSM IV_ -- had been only the first of these insufferable provocations), and despite his strategic retreat to a point GPS-identifiable as 5,503 miles distant from Meshuggadale, Chiles still maintained a scholarly interest in what academicians technically describe as "recondite crap."

It was at this point that his (satellite-enabled) cell phone rang, cheerily blasting _The Funeral March of the Marionettes_ through its tinny speakers. This could only betoken a call from Meshuggadale... either the Scoobies, or Nick's Deli, still trying to collect on an old bet Chiles had made on a Laker's game, or on the date and time of The Apocalypse (rev. 4.0). Chiles valued his knees, not that they'd ever been much to look at, and so he hoped it was the former. Nick's knee-breakers belonged to an international federation the national chapter of which in the UK was in the midst of contract disputes (disputing who had and had not been killed by contract) with headquarters in the US, so Islington was currently experiencing a dearth of hobbled citizens, and Chiles decided that, under the circumstances, it might not be unreasonable to answer the phone.

Heaving himself unsteadily off the couch, setting off an uncertain chemical interaction of 39 scones and 4 gallons of Chamomille, Chiles sloshed across the room to his cell, still shrilling its tribute to Gounod, and arrived just in time to intercept Puffy's call.

"Chiles? I'm here at The Iron with Pander, and we need your help. Pillow has found an error in Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, Pander's seriously confused about the greenness of the eggs in this book he's attempting to read, and this really annoying vamp with seven chins has just eluded us for the third time and fled through a portal to the Hellmouth, where he's probably assembling an army of demons for yet another apocalyptic invasion of Meshuggadale. Or else playing Monopoly with Satan and Dick Cheney. But in any case, we thought you might want to fly down here and relieve us of doing anything whatsoever. Would that be OK? ...Chiles?"

"This is Rubeus Chiles'...um, voicemail. _Si quieres hablar con una representante en español, oprima el numero uno_. If you would like to make abstruse comments on obscure logical defects in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, please say or press two. If you would like to order a copy of my autobiography in Ancient Sumerian, please say or press three. If you would like to piss off, please press say or press four. If you are a Slayer and are seeking assistance, please hang up and call 911."

End of Chapter 10 


End file.
